Tag Archives: twitter

Although it’s not the most compelling story, this blog post is a terribly effective analogy. So effective, non-techies can read it and “get webhooks” … in some cases leading them to rally for webhooks as much as I do! The analogy focuses on a non-computer, real-world analogy based on telephone calls. Then it follows up with a more concrete example that helps explain the possibilities:

A concrete example of a story made possible from webhooks that might be a useful scenario for many of you involves Twitter. Let’s say Twitter supported webhook callbacks for when somebody follows you. Right now you get an email, and from there you can decide what to do manually: follow them back, block them, or do nothing. I used to go out of my way to block users that I knew were spam bots, but now there’s so many it’s not worth the time. And of course I also generally follow back people that I actually know. If Twitter would simply call a script of mine whenever somebody followed me passing along the user ID, I could very easily run this logic in a PHP script or a simple App Engine app. Or perhaps I’d use Scriptlets (ahem, which was made exactly for these kinds of web scripts). It would work like this:

First, use the Twitter API to look up the user from the ID, and grab their name. Then use the Facebook API to check if that name shows up in my list of friends on Facebook. If so, use the Twitter API to follow them back. Otherwise, if they’re following over 1000 users and that number is more than twice the number that’s following them (which is roughly the heuristic I use manually), use the Twitter API to block them. All automatic.

Definitely worth the read, if I do say so myself. It’s also worth pointing people that want a quick understanding of webhooks. What kind of analogies have you come up with?

It’s been a busy week for web hooks, eh? Well, I figured I might as well share a quick note I received while writing the Amazon post. Blaine Cook, former architect of Twitter, sent me a message after finding a post in which I said he was the one preventing Twitter from providing web hooks. You see, I gave my first public talk on web hooks at an event called SuperHappyDevHouse in 2007. Afterward, Alex Payne came up to me and said, “This is great, I’d love to put this in Twitter.” But it never happened, and I was under the impression Blaine was the one that shot the idea down.

Anyway, he sent me a message saying that although he thinks it’s unfeasible for Twitter to provide web hooks at their scale, he’s all for them in principle. In fact, he says his next project will have web hooks from the start, which is exciting to hear.

But I’m still not convinced Twitter is completely unable to provide web hooks. The fact they let you get all notifications via SMS means they’re either making a web request or at the very least, sending an email. Why can’t they asynchronously queue up the outgoing HTTP requests for users that want web hooks?

Anyway, the Twitter argument is for another time. I look forward to seeing what Blaine is up to and how he’s using web hooks.